Sunday afternoon I drove up to the West Midlands town of Kidderminster to meet Clare at the train station, as she'd been looking after Rhiannon in Kenilworth for two nights. We had two nights booked in a B&B to afford us short journeys to celebrations we were invited to on two successive days. First on Monday, Mike and Gail's ruby wedding anniversary party, held at Bodenham Arboretum. It's a family affair, developed in a visionary way from scratch out of a derelict farm they took over forty years ago. It's a beautiful place to visit at any season.
Thirty of us were invited to meet there for a guided tour by the owner' son. It was an informative introduction to the ecology and economy of a modern environmentally aware agricultural development project, conceived out of the owner's love of the world's trees. Some of the work they do now on the environment will come to fruit only in a century or two from now. How many people work with that kind of secret vision today?
Then followed our celebratory lunch in the Arboretum's restaurant, built into a hillside with a grass roof. All the food we ate was sourced locally, if not on the property itself. Mike and Gail's children and grand son were there. It turned out I was the only person present who'd been present at the wedding forty years ago, which was a good excuse for me to be the one proposing a toast. The weather was perfect, and the trees were laden with blossom and/or unfolding leaves in many colours - a feast for the eyes.
Then on Tuesday, over to Fairfield Parish Church for the wedding of Richard and Sue. We met Richard and his first wife Brig over the christening of their children, and I ended up presenting them for Confirmation. They later came to Geneva and stayed with us on the way to the ski slopes with their small children, Tom and Emma, and between them, taught me to ski up at Les Gets sixteen years ago. Then tragically, Brig died of cancer ten years ago, and is buried in Fairfield's churchyard. We were delighted however when Richard and Sue visited us last summer, to find that love had found them and was renewing their lives in middle age.
I felt so privileged to be invited to read 1 Corinthians 13 during the service, but otherwise to sit back and enjoy seeing another priest cope with a pastoral celebration. I valued everything about celebrating marriages when I was a Vicar, but found the responsibility for the occasion quite exhausting.
The wedding party took place in the banqueting hall of Avoncroft Museum, a sort of West Midlands version of St Fagan's museum of Welsh life. Much of the afternoon passed in a giant photo opportunity before we sat down to the meal followed by speeches. Just before the dancing started at eight, we had to depart in order to drive home, and prepare for the rest of Holy Week, the beginning of it having been put on hold to share in rejoicing with two couples with special places in our lives.
One of Avoncroft's boasts to fame is that it holds a national collection of various models of telephone boxes, interestingly displayed. Inevitably, this reminded me of a certain field in the Rhone valley, near the nuclear power stations not far from Valence, next to the Autoroute, which is filled with an assortment of France Telecom phone boxes of the past forty years. It's not a museum, but a dumping ground of surreal dimensions, still memorable across the years since I first noticed it en passant.
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